How to Setup an Affiliate Program and Increase Your Website Traffic and Sales

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Home Page > Internet > Affiliate Programs > How to Setup an Affiliate Program and Increase Your Website Traffic and Sales

How to Setup an Affiliate Program and Increase Your Website Traffic and Sales

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Posted: Nov 20, 2010 |Comments: 0
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Do you have a great product or service but find it hard to get traffic to your website? Do you find yourself wondering how you could make yourself more visible on the internet? One of the biggest problems currently facing online merchants is how to get people to their sites to buy their products.

Affiliate programs are one way to address this common problem. Affiliate marketing is a mutually beneficial practice that helps merchants, customers, and “affiliates.” You may not have heard of affiliate programs before, but you’ve definitely seen them. You’ve heard of Amazon.com right?

What are Affiliate Programs?

An affiliate program is an excellent way of getting other websites to sell or promote your product or service for a commission. Affiliate programs are arrangements between an online merchant website and an affiliate website—the affiliate posts a link to the merchant site and is paid a commission for any traffic or sold items. Posting links with affiliates is an excellent way to sell products online, and it is an inexpensive and effective marketing strategy.

There are three core players in the affiliate game: the merchant, the affiliate, and the customer. Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a “pay for performance” model, meaning that the merchant does not have to pay a marketing expense unless someone buys the product.

You have no doubt seen links to Amazon.com on tons of sites other than their own—this is because Amazon gets affiliates to post links to individual books for sale on Amazon, or for Amazon in general, by giving the affiliates a percentage of the profits if someone clicks on the link and then purchases books or other items. The affiliates help make the sale, but Amazon does everything else: they take the order, collect the money and ship the book to the customer. Amazon’s affiliate program is one of the most successful ones out there.

What are the different kinds of affiliate programs?

There are three basic types of affiliate program payment arrangements:

Pay-per-sale (also called cost-per-sale): In this arrangement, the merchant pays an affiliate when the link on the affiliate’s site leads to a customer purchasing something from the merchant’s site.

Pay-per-click (cost-per-click): In this arrangement, the merchant pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors who click on the link to the merchant’s site. The visitors don’t have to buy anything, and it doesn’t matter to the affiliate what a visitor does once he or she gets to the merchant’s site.

Pay-per-lead (cost-per-lead): In this arrangement, merchants pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

So why should I use an affiliate program?

You will become a lot more visible to a lot more people. Because your banners and links are placed on other sites you will greatly increase your online publicity.

You will have other people marketing your product and services, so it’s not all up to you.

Your sales will increase dramatically.

You will appear “bigger” than you are and your credibility will be increased.

It’s not expensive or complicated.

What you need to consider before you begin:

If you are interested in getting involved in affiliate programs, the first thing you have to do is decide whether you want to become an affiliate, want to acquire affiliates, or both. If you run a large merchant site and want to increase your sales, you might want to start your own affiliate program. If you run a small content site and would simply like to bring in a little money to cover production costs, joining a few programs as an affiliate would be a good choice. Your best option depends on what aspects of affiliate programs could best serve your site and how much you are willing to spend.

You need to decide what the objectives of your affiliate program are before you decide which option to choose. Some questions to consider include:

What kind of affiliate program is best for my business; that is, do you want to pay affiliates for actual sales, clicks or leads only?

Do you want your affiliates to market all your services and products or only some?

Do you want international affiliates or affiliates from your own country only?

Do you want to pay a percentage of sales or a flat rate?

How much are you willing to pay affiliates for sending you business? Industry standard is about 20% of a sale. (Any less than that isn’t as enticing for advertisers).

When deciding on which service to use to set-up your affiliate program, think of things from the affiliate’s point of view and what’s important to them. A key factor to running a successful affiliate program is having happy affiliates. Make things easy for them. Offer different banner sizes, text links, real-time stats and email notifications when sales are made.

Keep in mind that having more affiliates isn’t always better. The affiliate marketing experts say that 85% of referred sales will come from a few “super affiliates.” So don’t be too concerned if you only have a few affiliates. You don’t need a lot if you have good ones.

Now, how do you go about actually becoming an affiliate marketer?

Gone are the days when only the “big” sites could set up and run affiliate programs. Today it’s easy and there are a couple of ways of doing this. If you have your own merchant account but want an outside company to handle and track your affiliate program, you could use a service like either http://www.linkshare.com or http://www.cj.com but they charge large monthly fees and want you to commit to their program for a period of time.

Large sites develop their own custom software or use packages intended for Fortune 500-type operations. The affiliate software that tracks the sales partners make typically starts at several hundred and can go as high as the thousands. So what are some other options?

One great alternative for the smaller or beginner merchant who wants more control is to buy a software program that lets you start building an affiliate network right away without having to pay monthly charges. Once you buy the software, you upload it to your webserver and follow the provided installation instructions. After it’s installed, you’ll be able to login to create ad links for your affiliates, track results, and manage their accounts. There are many different software tools with a variety of features.

 

The affiliate software you choose should be inexpensive and have these features and benefits:

Start an affiliate program quickly and easily

Increase website traffic and sales

Have no fees beyond the initial software purchase

Unlimited number of affiliates

Track sales & download Excel-compatible reports

Monitor affiliate hits

Easily create, manage, and distribute affiliate ads

Direct customers to a targeted URL for a specific ad

Work with your purchase system or PayPal

With software like this, the process is simple. Affiliates sign up for an affiliate program and place the merchant’s ads (banner or text) on their sites. If someone clicks the ad on the affiliate website and buys something from the merchant’s site, the affiliate gets paid a commission. Starting your own affiliate program is definitely one of the best ways to increase web traffic and sales without any advance cash outlay; only results matter!

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Marc Murphy -
About the Author:

Marc Murphy is a technology entrepreneur who has several companies and believes technology is a means to an end; it is not an end in and of itself. Technology is only useful to the degree that it can create a positive, practical change in people’s lives. To this end he has created a user-friendly affiliate program, Affiliate Ally Pro, that does all the work. It counts hits, tracks sales, calculates commissions, and is compatible with your existing payment software. There are no fees; once you buy the software, it’s yours and there is no limit to the number of affiliates you can have. The software is available for instant downloading at www.novasignal.com.

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Affiliate programs are what most marketers concentrate on who are in the business to make money online. For some of us, we may have hobby websites but even those websites cost us money to a certain extent. Although there are many different ways that you can make money with your website, offering a relevant affiliate program is probably one of the easiest along with being one of the most profitable. Where can you find these affiliate programs and how can you match them up with your particular website?

There are a lot of different places where you can find affiliate programs. Some of the most popular include ClickBank and Commission Junction. Each of these particular websites gives you access to thousands of different individual affiliates through their system.

ClickBank offers digital products and things such as e-books and downloadable software while Commission Junction gives you access to thousands of real-world businesses and their websites in categories such as travel, clothing, insurance and a whole multitude of other options. Between these two particular systems, it should be easy for you to pick out an affiliate that matches up very well with your particular audience.

Another popular type of affiliate advertising that you can put on your website is found through programs such as Max Bounty or a Azoogle Ads. These companies team up with very specific types of affiliates, ones that are typically looking for a lead of some sort. It is fairly easy to find an affiliate program through one of the systems that you can match up with your website as well. These programs tend to pay very well for the lead but you may have a difficult time finding a lead program within the system that lasts for a long period of time.

Many of these programs are there on a temporary basis so you have to strike while the iron’s hot, make your money and check periodically to make sure that the affiliate is still active.

Matching a program with your particular audience is not a very difficult thing to do. At times, however, your audience may be relatively general and may not fit into a particular niche. In this case, check out one of the pay per lead affiliate programs as you may be able to match it loosely to your visitors. If you find one that converts well, you’ll be surprised at how much money you can make with a simple affiliate program like this.

Affiliate programs are a means to increase your online business revenue. At the end of the day, you need an online business which is yours. Your business should concentrate on a niche which includes these related affiliate programs you can recommend to your prospects.

What many internet marketers forget is that instead of sending people directly to affiliate programs, they should send them to an opt-in page so that the emails are captured first. The selling of the affiliate programs occur in the autoresponder series. All this happens after you have captured the email addresses.

A good example of an optin form is at http://www.trafficbeast.com/newsletter Here you can see that the whole point of the web page is to capture the email addresses before emails are delivered to recommend affiliate programs that are of value.